Category: Politics

I awoke this morning to a palpable depression in the energy around me. I didn’t need to interact with anyone to feel it. So many around me were sad, grieving the loss of someone…or something. Things weren’t any better when I went to class this afternoon. Our professor was so depressed he couldn’t teach, and so our class spent twenty-five minutes talking about the election.

As I sat observing and meditating on what I was seeing, I realized that people were literally feeling as though someone had died. Even my family snapped at me when I reminded them that I saw Trump’s victory coming back in August. (Please know that I didn’t care who won, but I know human nature enough to know well in advance who would. More on that another time.)

When I started this series on Christianity and feminism many months ago, I told you why I do not consider myself a (secular) feminist. I found secular feminism to be philosophically shallow, and said that I thought Christianity offered a more robust basis for gender equality, but that because equality based in God wasn’t equality on our terms, we may not like the implications.

The catalyst for this series was a Christian Ethics class I took last fall as part of my program at Fuller Theological Seminary, and one of the things I’d learned from my exploration of this issue as part of that class is that my disagreement with my classmates and with the authors we read boiled down to how much authority we assigned to the Bible and (consequently) how we interpreted it.

So, in the first post of this series, I walked you through what the Bible is. I told you how the Bible came to be what it is and how that story, coupled with the high authority I assigned to the Bible, led me to interpret the Bible using a biblical narrative hermeneutic, which is just a fancy way of saying that I interpret the Bible as one cohesive story, from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22.

I’m quite certain that no name has been mentioned more frequently around American dinner tables in the last six months than that of Donald Trump. In fact, according to Google, searches for Donald Trump went up almost ten times in volume, to around 6.3 million, beginning in June of this year. The reason? Donald Trump has thrown his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination to be the next President of the United States, and it goes without saying that he’s been something of an…interesting candidate.

Last week, a host of Republican governors openly declared that their states would not welcome Syrian refugees fleeing the terror of ISIS and their war-torn country. I was deeply troubled by their remarks, because before the Constitution was even ratified, it was already clear that the control of immigration would rest squarely with the federal government. (See Arizona v. United States, 132 S.Ct. 2492 (2012), for a history.) But even more troubling for me has been the response from the community of people who claim the name of Jesus.

This is just one more heartbreaking episode of a recurring drama in American political life. Those who claim to know Jesus—the God-man who summed the entirety of the Old Testament law in two commands: Love God and Love Others—are the very same people who more often than not assume a political posture that is cold if not outright hateful.